Hard Disk Drives are now in great demand, which has pushed their price premiums up by an average of 46% since mid-September. According to the ComputerBase tracker, HDDs have increased their prices over the past four months by anywhere from 23% to 66%, depending on the model. Standing at the lowest 23% increase is the Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS HDD + Rescue 16 TB HDD, while the highest price increase was observed in the Toshiba Cloud Scale Capacity MG10F AFA 22 TB model. The price tracker followed fluctuations of the 12 most popular HDD models based on their EUR listings and found that HDDs rose by an average of 46% across the four-month period, resulting in spinning rust being almost 50% more expensive, without any substantial supply chain shortage.

A month ago in December, DigiTimes reported that fourth-quarter 2025 contract negotiations concluded with traditional HDD prices rising about 4% quarter-over-quarter, the largest increase in the past eight quarters. This contributed to the overall 46% price increase observed today, as these single-digit contract changes accumulate and multiply by the time they reach consumers. Interestingly, HDDs contain almost no silicon for storage purposes, making their significant price increases a supply chain issue unrelated to the semiconductor industry. Apart from the controllers that use silicon, HDD platters are made from materials that are not currently in short supply. However, high demand is what keeps their prices elevated.

Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX), a global leader in mass-capacity data storage, is showcasing advanced storage solutions at Intersec 2026 that help power the transformation of AI-driven video analytics into searchable, decision-ready intelligence. The edge-to-cloud portfolio is designed to help businesses unlock the full value of their data and make smarter, faster decisions.

AI applications in video image analytics (VIA) are fueling unprecedented data growth at the network edge. IDC reports that more than 75% of organizations expect their video data to at least double over the next five years, as AI adds summaries, annotations, and metadata to every frame. This surge is driven by new use cases across industries - from accelerating investigations and automating alerts to ensuring compliance and enabling deep operational insights.

ASUSTOR Inc. today announced support for Seagate's newly launched IronWolf Pro 30 TB high-capacity enterprise hard drive, also known as the ST30000NT011. These drives adopt the Mozaic 3+ technology, significantly increasing storage density on a single drive. It offers businesses a space-saving, high-performance, and highly durable solution for data-intensive storage environments. ASUSTOR's Ryzen-based Lockerstor Gen3 series combines full support for high-capacity drives with high-speed connectivity to meet and/or exceed the needs of stability, compatibility, and performance. With up to sixteen bays for Serial ATA drives, this means that our sixteen bay NAS drives support up to 480 TB in a single volume. As ASUSTOR supports the freedom to use any compatible drive or brand of drive since ASUSTOR NAS devices are not locked down, this fully unleashes the potential of your ASUSTOR NAS. This provides a more efficient and cost-effective storage option for high-capacity environments than locked down NAS products.

The ASUSTOR Lockerstor Gen3 series excels in scalability, durability, and operational efficiency. In ASUSTOR's quest to provide freedom for customers, ASUSTOR NAS devices support a wide range of options for hard drives and SSDs. Use SSDs in a Lockerstor Gen3 to improve performance in both random access and sequential access scenarios while using the SATA bays to obtain potentially hundreds of Terabytes. With 10GbE and USB4 connectivity, the Lockerstor Gen3 series easily handles high-bandwidth and high-density applications such as video post-production and enterprise file servers. As enterprise IT infrastructure shifts toward decentralized deployment, an ASUSTOR NAS's flexible hardware design and open platform that supports the freedom to use third party hard drives and SSDs has become a preferred choice for edge storage.

Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a global leader in mass-capacity data storage, today announced the global channel availability of up to 30 TB Exos M and IronWolf Pro hard drives. Built on Seagate's Mozaic3+ platform and powered by heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, these drives are engineered to meet increasing demand for scalable, high-performance storage driven by the rise of AI deployments that are supplementing traditional enterprise infrastructure development. With over one million Mozaic hard drives now shipped, Seagate has reached more than just a milestone—it has marked a defining moment that underscores the strength and maturity of its breakthrough storage technology.

"Today, approximately 90% of the world's data is stored in just 10 countries. However, data gravity is increasingly pulling networks to the edge as nearly 150 countries adopt data sovereignty requirements, and AI workloads continue to expand. Datacenters—on-prem, private, and sovereign—are leveraging AI to unlock the value of their proprietary data," said Melyssa Banda, SVP of Edge Storage and Services, Seagate. "Our 30 TB drives are designed to support these rapidly growing trends, delivering the capacity, efficiency, and resilience needed to power the AI workloads."

ASUSTOR Inc. has updated the hard drive compatibility list by adding Seagate's IronWolf Pro 24 TB high-capacity NAS hard drive. The listed model is ST24000NT002. IronWolf Pro is designed for businesses and those that want the very most in data capacity. Using Seagate's 24 TB hard drives in conjunction with the largest ASUSTOR NAS devices means that some ASUSTOR NAS devices can support up to just under 400 TB.

24 TB drives also help ASUSTOR's MyArchive feature. The use of 24 TB hard drives helps make the backup process with MyArchive easier by using fewer drives. This helps facilitate safe 3-2-1 backups as well as providing as much archival storage as needed. Need even more space? Use the Xpanstor 4, one of the only expansion units featuring a 10 Gbps USB interface. It also supports MyArchive cold backup technology even on NAS devices that don't support hard drives. In addition to the additional 96 TB storage space provided by the four hard drive bays, the USB 3.2 Gen 2 port greatly increases the performance.

Today, Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, launched the new Seagate IronWolf Pro 24 TB hard drive addresses the evolving data demands of SMB and enterprise network attached storage (NAS) environments. With capacities ranging from 2 TB to 24 TB, the Seagate IronWolf Pro portfolio is built to scale the needs of any growing business. With sustained transfer rates of 285 MB/s, a user workload rating of up to 550 TB/year, and 2.5M hours mean time between failures (MTBF), the new Seagate IronWolf Pro drives are engineered to deliver 24x7 uninterrupted performance, reliability, and dependability in multi-bay and multi-user collaborative environments.

The drives are optimized for NAS systems with Seagate's AgileArray technology. Using dual-plane balancing and time-limited error recovery (TLER), AgileArray helps deliver best-in-class performance in multi-bay systems. Additionally, the drives offer built-in rotational vibration (RV) sensors paired with dual plane balancing that addresses vibrations to deliver consistent high performance and reliability.